Gripes: Yellow Dog Linux 2.2

19 April 2002

Hardware

1st Generation iBook (300Mhz G3), 96M RAM, with an upgraded HD (14G), a busted trackpad, and an external USB mouse that I now need to use.

Pre-Installation

My iBook has been with me for awhile. Over it's life, it's run MacOS 8.6, NetBSD, LinuxPPC (2 different versions), YDL 2.1, Debian, and now YDL 2.2. A few months ago, it was running YDL 2.1, which after awhile of tweaking, I was very happy with. Then, at work, it fell from a desk. It's HD and CDROM both died in the fall. I quickly got a replacement HD (I had never been satisfied with the small disk that shipped with the system). Unfortunately, for a very long time I didn't see a way of getting an OS on the thing. If it had been a SPARC box, I would've netbooted and netinstalled, but Solaris is quite good at that, and I know the SPARC monitor pretty well. No such luck with Linux. After a month or so of no laptop, I came across a guide to netinstalling Debian. I don't like debian, but for awhile I used it. Later on, I tried netbooting YDL for installation, still desperate to leave Debian's flavor of brain-damage. I got all the way into the installer, but found that the installer didn't support installing from anything but a CDROM. Terrasoft really should add NFS or FTP install methods for YDL -- it would save people a lot of trouble, and make it easier to install on large groups of systems. Anyhow, later I got a replacement CDROM for the system, and am running YDL 2.2 on it now (and typing this document on it). I bought YDL 2.1.. I might buy the next version of YDL on CDROM.

Install

The installer still has some rough edges (see my review of YDL 2.1), but it's much improved. It detected my hardware correctly, was happy with the USB mouse, and installed in X. Partitioning was pretty easy, and overall the interactive parts went well. There were two problems though.. first, the install didn't give enough feedback at times, and often I was tempted to reset during some of the long periods without screen updates, afraid that the system had hung. Secondly, the progress bars were huge, missized, and ugly. I can't imagine it being difficult for them to fix this, and perhaps they will in the next version.

Settling in

I was disturbed to find, with a generic install, that the NFS daemon and its friends don't seem to work properly. I haven't fixed this problem yet, and have temporarily disabled them, although I will need to get them working in order for my system to integrate with my home network properly. Perhaps I'll need to downgrade to YDL 2.1's nfs components. I was also surprised to find that mpg123 (a commandline mp3 player) isn't really mpg123 -- I noticed this when it had problems switching back and forth between mono and stereo mp3s when asked to play a list, and checked the version. Apparently, it's a GPL'd clone called mpg321. I don't mind trying new software, but I'd rather not have it snuck in under my nose. I wish vendors wouldn't do this. Finally, although X worked for the install, it didn't leave me with a config file that worked. I was able to quickly fix this with the program Xautoconfig4, plus some tinkering afterwards to get the default color depth to be 24 bit rather than 8 bit, but I wish I hadn't had to. The system does seem pretty snappy, and the sound support, like in YDL 2.1, is there. Now that I know how yup works, I realize that it's a decent tool for packages you don't want to compile/manage yourself. Some packages, such as vim, gcc, and perhaps rxvt, are things you will want to manage, but for the rest, yup makes it fairly easy to stay updated. It does, however, need at least a better manpage, or perhaps a HOWTO so people will be able to quickly learn what they need to do to use it. After my normal modifications, I've quickly made it a system I am comfortable on.

In sum

YellowDog Linux 2.2 is considerably improved over its predecessor. It's installer is decent, but needs further work and doesn't leave the system in a state where a beginner would be able to use it. With a bit of tweaking, it makes a very nice system. When the glitches are worked out, it will be one of the better distributions out there, and even now, for people who can get around the rough edges of the installation, it's an excellent system.

Update 25 May 2002

Actually, it looks like the nfs parts arn't broken at all. Instead, the installer didn't have the RPC portmapper running by default (or perhaps I accidentally turned it off? I'm not sure). Turning it on fixed nfs, and that problem is gone. Anyhow, this was at least partly my error.

Update 14 Jun 2002

I finally figured out why the mixer settings are always wrong when I boot. /etc/.aumixrc had some very odd settings in it, and I am certain that I never have messed with that file before. Is this some strange default that YDL did, or did it notice and save some screwball settings that the mixer was set at during install? I wonder..